Software Defaults as De Facto Regulation: The Case of Wireless APs
Rajiv C. Shah, Christian Sandvig · 2005
Today's internet presumes that individuals use software to make their own decisions to regulate spam, security, indecent content, and privacy. This emphasis assumes that individuals are both interested in and capable of setting filters, settings, and preferences. This assumption is worrying-- common sense and empirical evidence state that not everyone is so interested or so skilled. When regulatory decisions are left to individuals, for the unskilled the default settings are the law. Using evidence from the deployment of wireless routers, this study finds that defaults act as de facto regulation for the poor and poorly educated. Many have argued that software is a powerful form of regulation (e.g., Lessig, 2000) and that defaults in software regulate behavior, but empirical studies have been scarce. To empirically address the question of how significant default settings are in shaping behavior, this paper presents a large sample behavioral study of how people modify their 802.11 (“Wi-Fi”) wireless routers